I bet the regulators are not looking forward to this one at all. I doubt anyone outside the two companies and their stockholders like this idea, but they'll be bring so many lawyers, so many lobbyist, so many brought politicians, and gods knows what else. It'll be war. A useless, destructive war.

I don't understand Xeni's headline, which sounds cleverly snarky but completely misses the point of the article. Copps was articulating the danger of a non-neutral net controlled by politically powerful corporations. Does that make him a silly "Lost in Space" robot? Personally, I think the danger is very real.

Same here. The snarky "waves hands, screams 'danger danger'" headline seems to be entirely dismissive of the warning, as if the former commissioner is the Robot from Lost in Space, over reacting, yet the warning would seem to be one I'd expect every Boinger to agree with. So what's up with the headline?

""I thought the Comcast/NBCU merger was beyond the pale," Copps told Ars. "I was just stunned to see a couple years later they come back and they have $45 billion to pick up the second largest cable company."

Comcast argued that the deal isn't anti-competitive because Comcast and Time Warner don't compete against each other for cable and Internet subscribers in any individual cities or towns, but Copps isn't buying that argument."

Damn it, reality, I was attempting satire!

(also: ""The impact on customer bills is always hard to quantify. We're certainly not promising that customer bills are going to go down or even increase less rapidly," Comcast Executive VP David Cohen said in a conference call today in response to a question on price.")

Eh, I kinda thought that, too, but after a little thought: the robot on Lost in Space looked silly, but he was earnest. It looks silly for a former FCC commish to be warning us about this, but I think he's earnest, too.

I got the same feeling about the headline, but I do agree with his thoughts in the editorial. Let's hope /stifle laughter now/ that Congress and the FCC can pull their respective heads from their respective asses and put together something that protects the future of the internet as an area of functionally unbiased communication.

How can you take this guy seriously when he was, during his term, at the epicenter of all the financialization / commodification / consolidation?

Right, because once somebody does something you disagree with, they are wrong for life, and can never change their mind or learn anything new. No matter what they have to say, it's best to just mock them. So much easier than all that tedious debate.

Can we tag the soon-to-be merger as condoning the "Chris Christie" approach? Choke the pipes that go to your opponents? Because that's what's gonna happen.Also, I love that the Comcast CEO sounds hoarse from yelling about how these two behemoths don't compete and that's why they should merge. Isn't it the function of the open market to force those two to compete if they should want market share in the opponent's area?Fucking hell, the USA is quickly becoming a pessimist's dream come true.

Writing it off as 'Lost in Space robot' is pretty fucken shy of the mark I'm aiming for.

Why is there so much daylight between what these public officials profess to believe, and how they act?

Like Obama, Copps can make such a compelling argument in favour of a worthy stance that it's hard to believe he wouldn't want to walk the talk; if you can argue convincingly in favour of self-evident principles, how can you possibly be disingenuous?

So how is this possible? You might have to put on your tinfoil to get to the bottom of it... what are the odds that at some point in Obama's ascendancy, he had to lock away his balls after an unfriendly reminder of JFK's fate, or something like that?

I'm not sure how many would still scoff at such a notion, but to those who would, have you been paying attention? The world is clearly ruled by an opaque oligarchy with no accountability whatsoever, and politicians are ever more plainly puppets, along with most of what remains of the fourth estate... and as each decade goes by these scumbags get more blatant as our disenfranchisement grows.

It was almost certainly ever thus to some extent, but particularly these days, politics is virtually devoid of the management of civic affairs, and is instead just a place where big fish hang out to gobble up up little fish. During the cold war, folks believed their own propaganda and seemed to have a bit more respect for the foundations of liberal democracy, but now it's a fucking free-for-all; a race to see who can grab the biggest slice of the pie before it all falls over in a heap. This is plain for anyone to observe; if anybody disagrees, I'm sure others will back me up.

But anyway, I digress. We should be rioting in the steets until these scumbags are explaining their backflips under oath and leading us to the vile banksters et al.

The elite is lawless, and we're all living in a police state - fuck that noise.